This book is a collection of writings by active researchers in the field of Artificial General Intelligence, on topics of central importance in the field. Each chapter focuses on one theoretical problem, proposes a novel solution, and is written in sufficiently non-technical language to be understandable by advanced undergraduates or scientists in allied fields. This book is the very first collection in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) focusing on theoretical, conceptual, and philosophical issues in the creation of thinking machines. All the authors are researchers actively developing AGI projects, thus distinguishing the book from much of the theoretical cognitive science and AI literature, which is generally quite divorced from practical AGI system building issues. And the discussions are presented in a way that makes the problems and proposed solutions understandable to a wide readership of non-specialists, providing a distinction from the journal and conference-proceedings literature. The book will benefit AGI researchers and students by giving them a solid orientation in the conceptual foundations of the field (which is not currently available anywhere); and it would benefit researchers in allied fields by giving them a high-level view of the current state of thinking in the AGI field. Furthermore, by addressing key topics in the field in a coherent way, the collection as a whole may play an important role in guiding future research in both theoretical and practical AGI, and in linking AGI research with work in allied disciplines

This book consolidates and extends the authors' work on the connection between iconicity and abductive inference. It emphasizes a pragmatic, experimental and fallibilist view of knowledge without sacrificing formal rigor. Within this context, the book focuses particularly on scientific knowledge and its prevalent use of mathematics. To find an answer to the question "What kind of experimental activity is the scientific employment of mathematics?" the book addresses the problems involved in formalizing abductive cognition. For this, it implements the concept and method of iconicity, modeling this theoretical framework mathematically through category theory and topoi. Peirce's concept of iconic signs is treated in depth, and it is shown how Peirce's diagrammatic logical notation of Existential Graphs makes use of iconicity and how important features of this iconicity are representable within category theory. Alain Badiou's set-theoretical model of truth procedures and his relational sheaf-based theory of phenomenology are then integrated within the Peircean logical context. Finally, the book opens the path towards a more naturalist interpretation of the abductive models developed in Peirce and Badiou through an analysis of several recent attempts to reformulate quantum mechanics with categorical methods. Overall, the book offers a comprehensive and rigorous overview of past approaches to iconic semiotics and abduction, and it encompasses new extensions of these methods towards an innovative naturalist interpretation of abductive reasoning.

Are women really better than men at reading other people's minds? Are longer-married couples better than newlyweds at anticipating their partners' thoughts and feelings? Do we all possess a dormant "sixth sense" that, if fully utilized, could allow us to intuit with great accuracy what other people are thinking? Internationally recognized psychologist William Ickes answers these and many other questions in this fascinating examination of the mind's potential for "everyday mind reading." After developing an innovative video-based procedure for measuring the accuracy of people's empathic inferences, Ickes and his colleagues used this procedure to study different aspects of everyday mind reading in research conducted over the past 15 years. Among the issues they have explored are the validity of the belief in women's intuition, how long it takes strangers to "get to know" each other, why friendships promote mutual understanding, why twins tend to have similar thoughts and feelings, how people's frames of reference can both help and hinder their communication, and the neurological basis for our ability to empathize with others. Ickes also extends his inquiry to broader social questions. For example, are there ways of detecting when someone has a hidden agenda? Are there circumstances in which accurately "reading" an intimate partner's thoughts and feelings actually harms, rather than helps, the relationship? How can the results of the research on everyday mind reading be applied to improve parenting skills, the effectiveness of counseling, even sales and marketing? Finally, what does the scientific evidence say about the widely debated notion of ESP?

More than 40 years ago, E. Paul Torrance undertook to study creativity in students and study whether it would predict their creative achievements as adults. He and his colleagues wanted to determine what other factors influence, predict, encourage or sustain their creativity over time. There has never been a longitudinal study of creativity of this magnitude. Its findings will be useful to, and have implications for, several audiences: parents, teachers, counselors--especially vocational counselors--university and college instructors, and educational administrators. The Manifesto for Children was developed on the basis of the responses of 215 young adults who had attended two elementary schools in Minnesota from 1958 to 1964. They had been administered some creativity tests each year, and they were followed up in 1980. On the basis of their questionnaire responses, the Manifesto was developed to describe their ongoing struggle to maintain their creativity and use their strengths to create their careers and to provide guidance to children. In 1998, they were followed up to assess their creative achievements and to validate the Manifesto. Some of the participants had attained eminence, while others had attained only mediocre careers.

Philosophy and Neuroscience: A Ruthlessly Reductive Account is the first book-length treatment of philosophical issues and implications in current cellular and molecular neuroscience. John Bickle articulates a philosophical justification for investigating "lower level" neuroscientific research and describes a set of experimental details that have recently yielded the reduction of memory consolidation to the molecular mechanisms of long-term potentiation (LTP). These empirical details suggest answers to recent philosophical disputes over the nature and possibility of psycho-neural scientific reduction, including the multiple realization challenge, mental causation, and relations across explanatory levels. Bickle concludes by examining recent work in cellular neuroscience pertaining to features of conscious experience, including the cellular basis of working memory, the effects of explicit selective attention on single-cell activity in visual cortex, and sensory experiences induced by cortical microstimulation. This final chapter poses a challenge both to "mysterians," who insist that empirical science cannot address particular features of consciousness, and to cognitivists, who insist that addressing consciousness scientifically will require experimental and theoretical resources that go beyond those used in neuroscience's cellular and molecular core.
Bickle develops all scientific and philosophical concepts in detail, making this book accessible to specialists, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in either philosophy or the empirical brain and cognitive sciences. Philosophers of science, mind, neuroscience, and psychology, neuroscientists working at a variety of levels, and cognitive scientists-or anyone interested in interactions between contemporary philosophy and science and the nature of reduction-in-practice that informs current mainstream neuroscience-will find discussions pertinent to their concerns.

Arguably the most influential thinker on education in the twentieth century, Dewey's contribution lies along several fronts. His attention to experience and reflection, democracy and community, and to environments for learning have been seminal...

Young's thesis concludes that the higher activities of humans can be illuminated through an examination of the actual brain functions that produce them, and that these processes can be closely compared to those of a calculating machine.

This diverse set of essays traces Epstein's experimental and theoretical work over a 15 year period. Four of the essays were coauthored by the eminent psychologist B.F. Skinner. The book demonstrates how the scientific study of behavior can increase our understanding and effectiveness in many domains: creativity and innovation, parenting, artificial intelligence, self-improvement, and even world peace. Reviewers have praised the volume as an impressive effort by one of America's most notable psychologists.

Epstein's goals in writing this book were (a) to present some relatively interesting papers that can stand alone and (b) to organize and edit them so that sections have some integrity and so that the overall volume paints a fairly consistent picture of his evolving views on cognition, creativity, and behavior. Parts I and II focus on generativity research and theory and on some Columban (pigeon) simulations of human behavior, and Part III includes some related laboratory studies. Part IV is concerned with efforts to create a comprehensive science of behavior, and Part V includes essays about Skinner, one of the principle architects of behaviorism. Part VI includes forays into artifical intelligence, child rearing, categorization research, and other topics, and Part VII takes the volume to some uncertain reflections on growing older, and to a modest proposal for a day of world peace.

This book aims to highlight the vigour, diversity and insight of the various cognitive science perspectives on personality and emotion. It aims also to emphasise the rigorous scientific basis for research to be found in the integration of experimental psychology with neuroscience, connectionism and the new evolutionary psychology. The contributors to this book provide a wide-ranging survey of leading-edge research topics. It is divided into three parts, on general frameworks for cognitive science, on perspectives from emotion research, and on perspectives from studies of personality traits.

This wide-ranging survey of the state of the art in clinical pragmatics includes an examination of pragmatic disorders in previously neglected populations such as juvenile offenders, children and adults with emotional and behavioural disorders, and adults with non-Alzheimer dementias. This book makes a significant contribution to the discussion of pragmatic disorders by exploring topics which have a fast-rising profile in the field. These topics include disorders in which there are both pragmatic and cognitive components, and studies of the complex impacts of pragmatic disorders such as mental health problems, educational disadvantage and social exclusion. This book also presents a critical evaluation of our current state of knowledge of pragmatic disorders. The author focuses on the lack of integration between theoretical and clinical branches of pragmatics and argues that the work of clinicians is all too often inadequately informed by theoretical frameworks. She attempts to bridge these gaps by pursuing a closer alliance of clinical and theoretical branches of pragmatics. It is claimed that this alliance represents the most promising route for the future development of the field. At once a yardstick measuring progress thus far in clinical pragmatics, and also a roadmap for future research development, this single-author volume defines where we have reached in the field, as well as where we have to go next.

Thinking is an innate ability that most people take for granted. But like writing well or speaking effectively before the public, thinking well is a skill that can be learned and improved with practice. In this unique introduction to critical thinking, Robert Bartholomew and Benjamin Radford first lay out the principles of critical thinking and then invite readers to put these principles to the test by examining a series of unusual and challenging case studies. Assembling a wide range of bizarre but actual incidents from many cultures and various time periods, they demonstrate how the tools of critical thinking can help to unravel alleged paranormal events and seemingly mysterious behavior. What factors led to the "Martian panic" of 1938? Why did many people conclude that an alien spaceship crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947? How do we explain the panic expressed by otherwise normal Southeast Asian men who came to believe that a contagious disease was causing their genitals to shrink, or the frenzied dance manias that captivated thousands of Europeans during the Middle Ages? Bartholomew and Radford show that reality is very much a social construction, that cultural assumptions play a large part in our judgments about what is normal and what is deviant, and that the use of critical reasoning is our best means of ensuring an objective perspective.

That time is both a dimension of behaviour and a ubiquitous controlling variable in the lives of all living things has been well recognized for many years.
The last decade has seen a burgeoning of interest in the quantitative analysis of timing behaviour, and progress during the last five or six years has been particularly impressive, with the publication of several major new theoretical contributions.
There has also been considerable progress in behavioural methodology during the past decade. In the area of reinforcement schedules, for example, the venerable interresponse time schedule, fixed interval peak procedure and interval bisection task have been complemented by a 'second generation' of incisive instruments for analyzing timing behaviour.
Another area of recent development is the analysis of the neurobiological substrate of timing behaviour. Several research groups are currently studying the involvement of various central neurotransmitter systems in the timing behaviour, and the ability of centrally acting drugs and discrete brain lesions to alter timing processes.
Yet another recent development in timing research is the growing dialogue between two fields that have grown up separately, although, superficially at least, they seem to have much in common: the experimental analysis of 'interval timing', traditionally the province of experimental psychology, and behavioural chronobiology. The last few years have seen a growing interest in the comparative properties of the internal 'clocks' that regulate biobehavioural rhythms with time bases in the circadian range or longer, and those that are entailed in timing of intervals in the range of seconds or minutes.
All these areas of research, and others, are represented in the chapters that make up this volume. This book will help to promote further interactions among researchers who hail from disparate disciplines, but who share a common interest in the temporal properties of behaviour."

The Lost Self: Pathologies of the Brain and Identity is an in-depth exploration of one of the most mysterious and controversial topics in neuroscience, neurology, psychiatry and psychology-namely, the search for the biological basis of the self. The book is a guide to understanding how the brain creates who we are, and what happens when things go wrong. For the first time in a single volume, some of the foremost experts in the fields of philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, neurology, and psychology join together to explore the neurobiology of the self. They first lay the foundation for an understanding of the topic. Then they provide fascinating and detailed accounts of how the self is transformed in patients with brain lesions, autism, and dementia, as well as in drug induced states, during meditation, and while dreaming. Their analysis of these disorders and states is used as a springboard toward a deeper understanding of how a brain creates a self. This fascinating volume will be invaluable to neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, and philosophers of mind, and to their students and trainees.

This book presents the essential background for understanding semantic theories of mood. Mood as a category is widely used in the description of languages and the formal analysis of their grammatical properties. It typically refers to the features of a sentence-individual morphemes or grammatical patterns-that reflect how the sentence contributes to the modal meaning of a larger phrase, or that indicate the type of fundamental pragmatic function that it has in conversation. In this volume, Paul Portner discusses the most significant semantic theories relating to the two main subtypes of mood: verbal mood, including the categories of indicative and subjunctive subordinate clauses, and sentence mood, encompassing declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives. He evaluates those theories, compares them, and draws connections between seemingly disparate approaches, and he formalizes some of the literature's most important ideas in new ways in order to draw out their most significant insights. Ultimately, this work shows that there are crucial connections between verbal mood and sentence mood which point the way towards a more general understanding of how mood works and its relation to other topics in linguistics; it also outlines the type of semantic and pragmatic theory which will make it possible to explain these relations. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards in the fields of semantics and pragmatics, philosophy, computer science, and psychology.

If humans are purely physical, and if it is the brain that does the work formerly assigned to the mind or soul, then how can it fail to be the case that all of our thoughts and actions are determined by the laws of neurobiology? If this is the case, then free will, moral responsibility, and, indeed, reason itself would appear to be in jeopardy. Nancey Murphy and Warren S. Brown here defend a non-reductive version of physicalism whereby humans are (sometimes) the authors of their own thoughts and actions.
Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? brings together insights from both philosophy and the cognitive neurosciences to defeat neurobiological reductionism. One resource is a "post-Cartesian" account of mind as essentially embodied and constituted by action-feedback-evaluation-action loops in the environment, and "scaffolded" by cultural resources. Another is a non-mysterious account of downward (mental) causation explained in terms of a complex, higher-order system exercising constraints on lower-level causal processes. These resources are intrinsically related: the embeddedness of brain events in action-feedback loops is the key to their mentality, and those broader systems have causal effects on the brain itself.
With these resources Murphy and Brown take on two problems in philosophy of mind: a response to the charges that physicalists cannot account for the meaningfulness of language nor the causal efficacy of the mental qua mental. Solutions to these problems are a prerequisite to addressing the central problem of the book: how can biological organisms be free and morally responsible? The authors argue that the free-will problem is badly framed if it is put in terms ofneurobiological determinism; the real issue is neurobiological reductionism. If it is indeed possible to make sense of the notion of downward causation, then the relevant question is whether humans exert downward causation over some of their own parts and processes. If all organisms do this to some extent, what needs to be added to this animalian flexibility to constitute free and responsible action? The keys are sophisticated language and hierarchically ordered cognitive processes allowing (mature) humans to evaluate their own actions, motives, goals, and rational and moral principles.

This volume is the proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cognitive Neurodynamics (ICCN2013) held in Sweden in 2013. The included papers reflect the large span of research presented and are grouped in ten parts that are organized essentially in a top-down structure. The first parts deal with social/interactive (I) and mental (II) aspects of brain functions and their relation to perception and cognition (III). Next, more specific aspects of sensory systems (IV) and neural network dynamics of brain functions (V), including the effects of oscillations, synchronization and synaptic plasticity (VI), are addressed, followed by papers particularly emphasizing the use of neural computation and information processing (VII). With the next two parts, the levels of cellular and intracellular processes (VIII) and finally quantum effects (IX) are reached. The last part (X) is devoted to the contributions invited by the Dynamic Brain Forum (DBF), which was co-organized with ICCN2013.

The cognitive sciences, having emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, are recently experiencing a spectacular renewal which cannot leave unaffected any discipline that deals with human behavior. The primary motivation for our project has been to weigh up the impact that this ongoing revolution of the sciences of the mind is likely to have on social sciences in particular, on economics. The idea was to gather together a diverse group of social scientists to think about the following questions. Have the various new approaches to cognition provoked a crisis in economic science? Should we speak of a scientific revolution in economics occurring under the growing influence of the cognitive paradigm? Above all, can a more precise knowledge of the complex functioning of the human mind and brain advance in any way the understanding of economic decision-making?
This volume brings together economists from various traditions such as Austrian economics, evolutionary economics, institutional economics, law and economics, neuro-economics and bio-economics. More specifically, it contains contributions by William N. Butos and Roger G. Koppl, Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Carine Kreck and Elisabeth Kreck, Janet T. Landa, Thomas J. McQuade, Steven G. Medema, Bart Nooteboom, Richard A. Posner, Salvatore Rizzello and Alfons Corts.
*Examines the impact of cognitive science growth on the economics discipline
*Contributors represent a wide variety of economic thought and tradition
*Looks ahead to the future of economics